It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenage - son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that's where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period. She writes of 'Jimmy' Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, and of friends and family, and finishes with the beginnings of her career as one of America's most impressive memoir writers.

Praise for A Song Flung Up to Heaven

She has the knack of guiding us along the seamier side of life while making us feel refreshed and restored like a terrific gospel blues singer - Guardian

Told with the humorous, unsentimental wisdom that has gained her such a devoted following - Sunday Times

Angelou conveys a sense of the period, complete with the pulsating rhythms of local slang, while her own elegantly gentle view provides the bigger perspective....Angelou has lived a life that deserves writing about, and only she can make that story sing with life. - Scotsman

It delivers the same essential charge of uplifting warmth, clear-eyed sagacity and indefatigable generosity of spirit, leaving us only to hope that another series, covering the latter portion of the roller-coaster's progress, might be in the offering.' S - 'It's been a long time coming, but A Song Flung Up To Heaven triumphantly completes the six volumes of autobiography that began nearly 30 years ago with Maya Angelou's astonishingly successful I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings- a work that changed reader s

Maya Angelou

Dr Maya Angelou was one of the world's most important writers and activists. Born 4 April 1928, she lived and chronicled an extraordinary life: rising from poverty, violence and racism, she became a renowned author, poet, playwright, civil rights' activist - working with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King - and memoirist. She wrote and performed a poem, 'On the Pulse of Morning', for President Clinton on his inauguration; she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and was honoured by more than seventy universities throughout the world.

She first thrilled the world with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). This was followed by six volumes of autobiography, the seventh and final volume, Mom & Me & Mom, published in 2013. She wrote three collections of essays; many volumes of poetry, including His Day is Done, a tribute to Nelson Mandela; and two cookbooks. She had a lifetime appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University of North Carolina. Dr Angelou died on 28 May 2014.